Taylor Swift Calls Spotify a 'Grand Experiment'

— -- Taylor Swift's "1989" set a record by selling 1.287 million albums in a single week, but she also caused controversy by refusing to stream the album on Spotify, and pulling her music off the service entirely.

Now, she's explaining the thinking behind that decision.

"All I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," she told Yahoo Music. "I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free."

Swift, 24, added that she was advised to put "Shake It Off" on Spotify, but ultimately rejected the idea. If fans want to listen to her new music, she said, they need to buy the album.

"It didn't feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, 'If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it's theirs now and they don't have to pay for it,'" she said. "And so I decided to change the way I was doing things."

As for her phenomenal sales in general, Swift reiterated a claim she made earlier in the week that some experts initially predicted that "1989" would only move about 700,000 copies in its first week. For the singer, that was a stunning moment.

"When I saw that number that was lower than what we've done before as a prediction, I didn't really know what to expect anymore," she said. "Because I hoped that I had created something that people would want to buy. ... I just was hoping and praying that people still perceived there to be a value to someone's musical creation."